Children with articulation difficulties often have difficulty with fine motor skills. If your child has a hard time holding a crayon correctly, try building the strength of the writing fingers/tripod grasp with activities to strengthen the writing fingers.
Fine Motor Fun to Build Strong Writing Fingers
Before purchasing items below, consider materials you may already have at home. Choose two activities you think your child might enjoy and begin with those!
1) Encourage your child to use only the writing fingers to crumble squares of tissue paper and then glue them onto a simple coloring page, filling in the space that would typically be colored in. The crumpled tissue balls can be picked up with a strawberry huller and placed into a bowl. It’s also fun to play Sneaky Squirrel using the strawberry hullers.
2) Pony beads and pipe cleaners – make patterns with the beads as they are placed with the tripod fingers onto a pipe cleaner.
3) Lacing cards
4) Pull pennies hiding inside Yellow Theraputty with writing fingers. Each retrieved penny can be placed into a bank (or cut a slit into the lid of a container) using the same fingers. Roll the putty into a snake and pinch it from one end to the other, only using tripod fingers. Form tiny balls, then make mini pancakes with the thumb or pointer.
5) Tape a rubbing plate to the table and then tape a piece of paper over it, also to the table. Use a Crayon Rock in the “sleeping position” using the writing fingers to reveal the picture.
6) Use Cray pas with simple connect the dots and mazes (or stick with “sleeping” Crayon Rocks or try ⅓ of a broken, chunky crayon).
7) Color Matching or Patterning with Small Clothespins – Squeeze clothespins using the writing fingers onto a piece of cardboard into a pattern, or make lines or dots with the same color markers around the edge of the cardboard. Your child can match the clothespins to the colors.
8) Empty Spice Jar – Pick up a colorful craft stick or toothpick using the writing fingers and place it into a small hole at the top of the jar. Color-code the holes for a color-matching task with Sharpies to make it interesting.
Manhattan Handwriting Specialist/Occupational Therapist Lauren Stern, OTR/L, shared these ideas with me! If you have concerns about your child’s handwriting and fine motor development, she can be reached at lauren@laurensternKidsOT.com.
Stephanie Sigal provides speech therapy and kindergarten prep in Manhattan/on the Upper East Side of New York City, or over Zoom. You can reach Stephanie at sigalstephanie@gmail.com or 646-295-4473. Stephanie would love to hear about your child’s speech and language development.